Ask most teams to improve a product, and they’ll start adding features. Design thinking starts somewhere else: with the people who use it. It is a human-centered, iterative way of solving problems that begins by understanding what people need, then tests ideas quickly before anyone commits time or money. Design thinking was born in design studios, but managers, engineers, doctors and founders use it today.
What is design thinking?
Design thinking is a mindset as much as a method. It asks teams to resist jumping to solutions, to question whether they’re solving the right problem and to learn by making things rather than debating them. The approach was popularized by the design firm IDEO, which helped turn a way of working inside design studios into something any team could learn.
The five stages of design thinking
The most widely used model breaks the process into five stages. It begins with empathy: observing and talking to the people affected to understand their experience, not just their stated preferences. Teams then define the problem in human terms, turning what they’ve learned into a clear challenge.
Ideation follows, generating many possible solutions before judging any of them. In the prototype stage, the strongest ideas become rough, cheap versions people can react to. Testing puts those prototypes in front of real users to see what works and what doesn’t.
The stages aren’t a checklist. Testing often sends a team back to redefine the problem, and that loop is the point. Other models, such as the Design Council’s Double Diamond, describe the same rhythm of exploring widely before narrowing down, and it’s a framework that product managers use too.
Design thinking in practice
Doug Dietz, an industrial designer at GE Healthcare, had worked for years on a state-of-the-art MRI scanner. When he visited a hospital to see it in use, he watched a frightened young girl on her way to a scan. He later learned that about 80% of children between three and eight needed sedation to get through one.
Dietz started with empathy. He brought together child life specialists, experts from a children’s museum and children themselves to see the scan through a child’s eyes. The problem he defined wasn’t the machine’s performance. It was fear.
The team’s idea was to turn the scan into an adventure, and the prototypes reimagined the whole room. In one version the scanner became a spaceship, and its loud noise became part of the story. Piloted at a children’s hospital in Pittsburgh, the Adventure Series sharply reduced the need for sedation. The technology inside the machine never changed. The experience around it did.
How to start using design thinking
You don’t need a workshop or a design degree to apply it. A few habits go a long way.
• Talk to people before proposing anything. Even five short conversations with the people affected will surface assumptions you didn’t know you were making.
• Reframe the problem as a question. Starting with “How might we…” turns a complaint into an opportunity and keeps options open. “How might we make an MRI feel less frightening?” leads somewhere very different from “How do we sedate children faster?” As a general rule, approach with curiosity and you’re on the right track.
• Build the cheapest version that answers your question. A sketch, a role-play or a paper mock-up is often enough to learn what you need.
• Test before you commit. Put the prototype in front of real users early, and treat what goes wrong as information rather than failure.
Where design thinking falls short
Design thinking has its critics, and some of their points land. In a widely discussed 2017 talk, Pentagram partner Natasha Jen argued that the method had been reduced to sticky notes and workshops, with too little attention to craft, evidence and critique. A team can run an energetic brainstorm, cover a wall in ideas and then change nothing.
Empathy alone also doesn’t guarantee a good product. A solution people love can still be too expensive to build or impossible to sustain as a business. IDEO itself describes the strongest ideas as sitting where three lenses overlap: 1. what people want, 2. what is technically feasible and 3. what is economically viable.
The fairest reading is that design thinking is a starting point, not a complete system. It works best in teams that also bring business judgment and technical knowledge, and that have the authority to act on what they learn. The GE example worked because a designer inside the company could change what was built.
Where design thinking can take you
These skills show up well beyond design studios. Product managers use them to decide what to build, service designers to shape experiences across many touchpoints and innovation consultants to help organizations test ideas before investing in them. Learning to think this way is less about a job title than a habit: understand people first, then act on what you learn.
If this topic interests you, the Master in Product Management & Design Innovation explores design thinking alongside business strategy and technology, applied to real company challenges.
Scott is editor-in-chief of Uncover IE and Senior Content Manager at IE University. He holds degrees in English Literature and Spanish from Saint Louis University and has spent more than a decade working in content strategy, editorial leadership, journalism and multilingual communications.
